Watched this recently and adored the look, especially interior and night time exteriors of 'Joe's' cabin. I'm curious, I'm not a pro, I'm here to learn.

I don't know what the original prints of this picture would have looked like, but the image on my tv was beautiful. Very warm, like an oil painting. Wonderful lighting. The night scenes outside the cabin were I think sets in some cases. The interior cabin scenes were wonderfully lit, with candles and kerosene lamps.

How would these scenes have been lit, what might have been the type of film stock, lenses, etc? Anyone have any opinions on it? Just curious.

I believe Shane was mostly a studio shoot, minus a few real exteriors. So all of those night time and indoor shots were in a sound stage. Back then, film stocks were not sensitive at all, so filmmakers had to use a lot of light. Also at the time, there was an unwritten rule that your leading man or woman, needed to be seen perfectly and clearly. So things were very over-lit and even dark scenes, had dozens of huge, multi-thousnd watt arc lamps lighting them. They would focus lights on certain areas and use metal flags and other deflection devices to restrict the light in order to create light and dark sections. Though if you look carefully, you'll notice that even the dark sections, have detail.

The film was shot with black and white film stock, using a 3 strip technicolor camera. This process separates the colors through a prism and then after processing, there is a different colored dye applied to each piece of film. Then when a print is made, the dyes are transfered to a piece of cellulid and we see the 3 colors combined. This process is to this day, the best color process ever developed for motion picture film.

Shane's restoration, most likely went back to the original three strip negative, which was scanned, stabilized and then combined together digitally. Thus, the digital version will look different then the original film version due to the variances in the three negatives that are cleaned up in the digital version. I recently saw an original print of a 3 strip western from the same vintage and it looked really nice, it has a classic technicolor look to it; lots of saturation. It's that saturation that makes three Technicolor stand out amongst it's peers and even though when Shane was made, they had single strip color film, many movies continued to shoot on 3 strip for years to come.

You should google search "three strip technicolor" and you will learn all about the format and what movies were shot in it, the list is a who's, who of "classic" movies.

Yes, 3-strip Technicolor -- by the year this movie was made, it was a tungsten-balanced system using three b&w film stocks in the camera, with a practical working ASA of around 16 ASA, maybe more. Kodak released the first color negative movie film in 1950, as a 16 ASA daylight-balanced stock, claiming it was equivalent to (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "current popular color technology" (i.e. Technicolor) but replaced it in 1952 with a 25 ASA tungsten-balanced stock. By the end of 1955, 3-strip Technicolor photography was obsolete.